Agentic AI seems to make middle managers obsolete. A psychologist (Irene Kraegel), a comms researcher (Craig Mattson), and an HR professional (Rachel Hammond) make visible what managers do that agents can’t.

In March of this year, Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha made the case for eliminating middle management. Organizations, they said, need less hierarchy and more intelligence. And by intelligence, they meant faster flows of information. They noted that agentic AI will “coordinate work in ways that previously required humans relaying information through layers of management.”

Their argument’s become the conventional wisdom in the large corporations that employ most workers today—companies like Block, GitLab, Microsoft, and Meta.

But what about the many, many other companies (99.9% of businesses today) that have fewer than 500 employees? Should they imitate their larger cousins and get rid of hierarchy?

Should you at your company swap your managers for BoodleBox agents?

This week on Mode/Switch: Second Opinion, Irene Kraegel and I talk with Dr. Rachel Hammond, a management professor and an MBA director about the costs of eliminating the managers. Our discussion follows three movements:

• History: Eliminating management isn’t as fresh an idea as it sounds. (Rachel takes us back to Max Weber and forward to the business computers of the 1980s.)

• Process: Agentic AI liberates managers from hours of filling out forms. But is this tech freedom fostering human heedlessness? (Irene notes the neurological imperatives of human connection in the workplace.)

• Formation: If we cut the middle rungs of the workplace ladder, how do we grow our people into the leaders our organizations need?

But for me, the central question emerges in a recent conversation between Ezra Klein and Arvind Narayanan: is intelligence the same thing as power?

Sure, agentic AI can help us trade hierarchy for intelligence, bureaucracy for information. But are organizations more than the sum of their cybernetic flows? Are working communities more than the movement of information?

You might object that I’m leading the witness here with these questions. Objection sustained—if you hit play on the pod.

Cheers to all the humans, especially the manager ones!

Thanks for engaging Mode/Switch: Second Opinion with Craig Mattson & Irene Kraegel! Share this pod with 4 org leaders, 3 managers, 2 team members, 1 cat, and 0 bots.

What can a TikTok dance tell you about your team member? Less than you think, says this week’s guest, Kylan Rutherford.

Podcasts like The Mode/Switch keep telling managers to try to better understand their team members. Get curious. Build empathy. Cultivate rapport.

What better way to do that than finding them on FB or TikTok?

Scratch that. Social media may be one of the worst places to get to know your team.

Or so says our Mode/Switch Pod guest Dr. Kylan Rutherford. He’s a social scientist who’s done work at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, and he’s now the director of Normsy Labs, which uses AI to “transform toxic online behavior and build pathways to healthier digital conversations.”

The only way you’ll get to know your employee better is if you can access their finsta. Which you probably can’t. If you’re unsure what a finsta is, you’re in good company. Our intergenerational table was split on that one too, and Kylan brings everyone up to speed. Around the table: Gen X insight from David Wilson and me, Millennial tact from Josh DiMarco, and Gen Z skepticism from Alex Johnson.

If as a manager, you’ve ever caught yourself saying, “Well, my employee chose to post it, so why not check it out?” or “Following them online will help build rapport at work,” this conversation will give you pause. What you’re trying to learn on Insta, and what you’ll actually learn, Kylan says, will be widely divergent.

But here’s what you’ll come away from this podcast better able to do:

• Ask what an online signal tells you about a team member

• Grasp why some people disclose so much online while others don’t

• Stop treating an employee’s feed as their “real” self

• Discern when to make space for politics and religion in tricky workspaces

Managers, let me ask: Have you ever learned something about a coworker online that changed how you saw them at work? Let me know in the comments below!

You can learn more about Kylan Rutherford’s research here.